Since launching a little less than two years ago, the OpenDaylight Project has rapidly gained steam, with Cisco, Brocade, and Red Hat backing the open source controller, just to name a few.

We recently had a chance to chat with David Meyer, the chair of OpenDaylight's board of directors. Meyer, who also works a day job as CTO at Brocade, stepped up to chair the board in November, after serving as the founding chair of the project's technical steering committee.

In his new role, Meyer is more focused on the big picture than the technical details. As he begins his first full year as board chair, he laid out his top three priorities for OpenDaylight in 2015.

"The first priority in my mind is to get more stable, highly functional, scalable code into the marketplace," says Meyer. "Helium [OpenDaylight's second release, launched in October] took a big step into that direction."

Now the project's attention is turned to Lithium, the release scheduled for June.

"It's really important to get quality code into the field," says Meyer. "Code talks louder than everything else. If you don't have that, you don't have anything."

As OpenStack gains traction as the de facto open source cloud computing platform, OpenDaylight's Meyer sees tighter integration as key to both projects' success. OpenDaylight already has a plug-in enabling communication with Neutron, OpenStack's network management module, but Meyer thinks there's more to be done.

"We need better integration — not just technical integration, but cultural," says Meyer. "It's about getting more Neutron developers involved and building a community around that."

Think about OpenDaylight's controller platform as an operating system for the network, like Windows for a desktop or iOS for a phone. Once you have the OS, what about the apps?

"The ecosystem is measured by how many applications people can run on their controller," says Meyer, offering traffic engineering and network visualization apps as examples.

OpenDaylight's success — or failure — in attracting third-party application developers may be the canary in the coal mine for the project as a whole.

"If you see a big ecosystem evolving, you know you're being successful," says Meyer. "Developers won't develop on something that they don't think will see the light of day."